Manchester Fly Facility / Sustainability

Sustainability

Improving sustainability in research laboratories

Key steps

Plastic pollution and carbon (-equivalent) emissions are key risk factors for our environment that are caused or massively enhanced by human activity. Without doubt, research work in laboratories and the waste produced contribute to both risk factors, often in avoidably excessive ways. If you want to help reverse this trend, a number of aspects need to be considered including the right motivation, awareness of strategies, their implementation, and dissemination. 

More details on our key steps
  • Accepting responsibility and ownership – Do you and people around you care and feel motivated to invest time and energy?
  • Awareness of the possible strategies; these are in crude terms:
    • Reduce / Reuse – reduce litter production and energy-intense procedures by revising your routine procedures; reduce plastic waste which can often be done through reuse
    • Replace – where possible replace plastics by biodegradable plastics or less harmful materials; replace harmful chemicals where possible
    • Recycle / Remove sensibly – where litter is unavoidable, champion recycling procedures or cleaner ways of waste disposal (e.g. biogas plants rather than landfill)
  • Taking initiative & implementation – getting started requires time and energy and often leadership; it involves
    • gaining the necessary knowledge to be able to make informed decisions
    • being creative & innovative in revising procedures
    • convincing others to enage on this path
  • Sharing good practice – you may want to go beyond your own contribution and generate more impact by inspiring others to follow suit; this may involve making all required information easily accessible, engaging others at your institution in similar practices, involve sustainability in your teaching, being prepared to engage in outreach

Potential barriers

However, you need to be realistic from start; a number of aspects may stand in the way which you need to be aware of, and which might require flexible solutions and often extra initiative. These concern motivation, organisational support, cost & time investment, lack of technology or infrastructure, rules & regulations and the maintenance of standards.

More on potential barriers
  • Motivation – achieving team spirit valued by line managers is the ideal scenario on path to sustainability; however, don’t be surprised if you encounter lack of motivation within your research group or line management
  • Organisational support & incentives – you may encounter little institutional support; this said, more and more organisations introduce frameworks promoting sustainability, acknowledge individual initiatives, or support facilitating pipelines and resources; external organisations, such as funders, emphasise sustainability to incentivise researchers and organisations (whereas national and international legal frameworks remain unfortunately poor and undecisive);
  • Cost & time investment – often sustainable processes can be money-saving at consumable and energy levels, but they might involve more work (e.g. cleaning in reuse scenarios) – and salaries are usually costly; if sustainability involves extra net cost, this might become a barrier
  • Lack of technology or infrastructure – to give some examples: (1) of the main plastics used in laboratories, the recycling of PET or polypropylene seems far easier than polystyrene; there might not be any companies in your area that recycle Ps; (2) you may want to use biodegradable plastics, but suitable variants might simply not be on the market or are far too expensive
  • Rules & regulations – rules and regulations often have to balance competing interests; for example, biosecurity or health & safety rules and the way they are interpreted by safety officers can stand in the way of more sustainable processes; this said, sometimes these conflicts can be solved with persuasion & well-substantiated argumentation
  • Maintaining standards – achieving high standards of sustainability in laboratories can be a satisfying and motivating process; maintaining these standards is a very different challenge and requires stamina, discipline, constant reminders of lab members and induction of newcomers; you may face fatigue if you are investing extra hours to carry out necessary procedures (e.g. cleaning for reuse)

In a nutshell, the task of approaching sustainable research is challenging and requires time, effort, dedication and stamina, persuation and lobbying. It will be easier the more of us contribute and the more governments and institutions stand behind these efforts to generate favourable conditions and infrastructure. Here we aim to facilitate this process by sharing good practice, ideas and instructions – not only for Drosophila laboratories but also beyond.

Improving sustainability in Drosophila research laboratories

Like all labortories working with model organisms, also Drosophila laboratories have to consider two major activities: the actual experimental work and the husbandry of fly stocks.

Improving sustainability of the experimental work

This task will depend on the nature of the research. For example, studies by Weber and colleagues found that a cell & tissue culture laboratories produces ~7 times more plastic waste than a standard molecular biology laboratory, with likely little prospect of reuse – this poses very different research-specific challenges. Our literature collections below lists many examples of articles providing ideas and inititiatives to address these challenges.

Improving sustainability of Drosophila husbandry

This task involves glass or plastic containers used for keeping flies. These containers are can be subject to single-use or re-use. As suggested by our own analysis, there are choices to be taken in either scenario that will have impact on sustainability. The pros and cons of these various procedures and their econimc and energy costs are discussed in our paper.

More on improving husbandry
  • material: glass, polystyrene, polyethylene, (biodegradable?)
  • inactivating flies: freezing, autoclaving
  • re-use procedures: hand- or machine wash, choice of detergent, form of decontamination
  • choice of waste removal: landfill, incineration (high or low temperature), plastic recycling, organic waste disposal into the sewer

Procedures used in different fly laboratories

In the following we will collate a commented list of procedures that different fly laboratories have adopted and want to share as good practice, hopefully giving you some ideas what procedures to implement and how to implement them:

A list of sustainability-focussed publications & online resources

As indicated in (A) above, awareness of possible strategies with their underlying rationales and calculations is not straightforward and has to develop over time by gaining the necessary knowledge and understanding. To facilitate the process, we have listed publications and online resources that we are aware of and found helpful (please, let us know any suggestions you may have!).

Sustainability initiatives and case reports concerning research laboratories
Relevant technologies
Relevant background information and procedures
Guidelines, political developments
The University of Manchester